Even if you think no one is watching, you may be getting noticed at work for all the wrong reasons (or at least these five), and that could be why your career path is growing weeds.

Just Barely Doing Your Job

When you started your job, you were probably told what hours you needed to work and what tasks you would be responsible for completing. You already know that just doing the minimum required of you won’t get you noticed, but what if it did? You don’t want to be noticed at work for coming in a half hour late and leaving a half hour early every day. If you’re cutting out as soon as you can, people can see you and they’re noting your lack of effort.

On the flip side, if you’re taking on a lot of responsibilities in order to get noticed at work, but you’re letting your basic job requirements fall through the cracks or handing off badly done work, you are being noticed for all the wrong reasons and you’re headed for a stale work life.

Overdressing can have the same effect. They say you should dress for the job you want, but keep it reasonable. If you work on the factory floor, for example, wearing a suit and tie will interferes with your ability to complete your tasks—you will get noticed and it will not be good. Just make sure you always look well-kempt, tidy and like you respect yourself and your job. Find other ways to stand out.

Contributing in All the Wrong Ways

Leadership and management do like to see people with creative ideas and innovative approaches making contributions. But if you’re constantly interrupting meetings with random, not-at-all-thought-out ideas, you will be noticed more for causing disruptions than making positive contributions. And if you’re the person who derails a meeting agenda to bring up something off-topic or that should be handled in a different venue, that’s another bad way to get noticed.

Remember, there’s a difference between volunteering to assist on a complicated project that needs help moving forward and sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong just for the sake of standing out. Plan your contributions, because nobody wants to promote “that guy.”

Being Seen … Badly

Yes, being more visible within the organization is a good way to get noticed by leadership. But, you have to be visible in the right ways. If you are going to company events to have a chance to rub elbows with organization leaders, do not be the drunk employee who goes around accidentally slinging insults badly disguised as witty banter. That’s not how you want to be noticed.

If you join company league teams to have a chance to network outside your department, you don’t want to be seen as the employee who gets overly competitive and yells for 10 minutes when someone makes a mistake.

Big Head, Big Mouth

To get noticed at work, sometimes you have to keep track of your accomplishments and make sure people higher up on the org chart know you’ve made them. But, if your head and your mouth are bigger than the rest of you, then you will definitely get noticed for the wrong reasons. It requires a little finesse, but pointing out to your manager that a client was happy with an end result should not turn into bragging. You can do this by bringing it up privately, rather than in the middle of a larger discussion.

You also don’t want to be known for taking credit for others’ work. Be careful to take your credit when it’s due and then offer credit to others on the team who helped or whose contributions added to the finished product. And you will not be very successful if you spend a lot of time belittling the work and efforts of others in order to make yourself look better. A positive spin doesn’t require a negative launch. Focus on yourself, but maintain your humility and you can be noticed for what you do and not how loudly you can brag about it.

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